Well, reflecting on this course as a whole, I have to say that it pretty much met my expectations, and it certainly proved to be an interesting experiment in terms of class format. Going into this class, my main goal was to find out more about Latin-American revolutionary history, which – Euro-centric education obliging – …
Thursday Class 3/17/2016 The Country Under My Skin Before discussion: A brief historical view of pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, the video explains a bit about the involvement of the United States and how its intervention in Nicaragua eventually lead to the formation of the Sandinistas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBNV3lpdZY 2:25 – 9:25 Discussion Topics: Do we, as …
I found all the readings assigned for this week very interesting, but I was most struck by “The Colonialism of the Present”, and his framing of the ongoing settler colonialism in Canada. I was relatively unfamiliar with the current struggles of indigenous peoples in Canada, although I assumed they would be relatively similar to what …
The Country Under My Skin by Gioconda Belli is definitely the most “biographical” of all the works we have seen so far, with the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 acting as an ever present backdrop to Belli’s very eventful life. However, Belli’s passion for and dedication to the Sandinista movement – from when she first truly …
While this book may be the driest and less inviting reads we have been faced with this class, it is also fair to say that it is probably the most historically important. As the preface and Fidel Castro’s introduction in particular point out, the events Che describes in his Bolivian Diary and his ensuing execution …
Initially, I was surprised that the first part of Steven Soderbergh’s Che showed so little of Guevara`s life before the Cuban Revolution, with only a couple of brief scenes showing him meeting the Castro brothers and looking pensive on the deck of the Granma. However, the point of the film is clearly to depict Che …
While I enjoyed this week’s reading of Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, I still think it was somewhat held back by its aim of extracting general teachings from the Cuban revolution. If anything, it is very interesting as a historical account of the military strategies and techniques of Fidel’s revolutionary forces, and also provides detail on …
Out of all three of the works we have seen and read on the Mexican Revolution, Cartucho is definitely the one that struck me the most. In a sense, Nellie Campobello’s novel / collection of short stories could be described as the diametric opposite of Kazan and Steinbeck’s Viva Zapata!. Campobello never makes any attempt …
After reading the first few chapters of Mariano Azuela’s The Underdogs I began to suspect that the novel would follow the same broad narrative path as Viva Zapata!, with Marlon Brando’s portrayal of the hero of the Revolution replaced by the fictional but no less charismatic Demetrio Macias. From the offset he is shown to …
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into Viva Zapata!, knowing it was both written by John Steinbeck – a figurehead of American socialism – and produced in the heyday of McCarthyism. Despite having now seen film, I still find it hard to ascribe it any kind of clear-cut ideological line. If anything, Viva …